DiscoMusic.com
offers a listing of 700 disco records at
this link.
Amazingly, only 22 songs are by 13 artists who actually
were openly gay. In addition to the ones in this show, they
included Paul Jabara, Luther Vandross, Pet Shop Boys, Patrick
Duvet, and Johnny Mathis. While disco may have been popular at
our clubs, in my opinion as a genre it wasn't really "our"
music.

The
ScriptPart 1This is JD Doyle and welcome to Queer
Music Heritage for September, which will be a very different
show than usual. I've been in a Trash Disco mood lately so decided
to do an entire show of that genre.
Now, what is Trash Disco? Well, that's a bit subjective, but to
me it was dance oldies, mostly hits,
prior to say, 1985. And in many cities in the years after that at
local clubs the music sometimes got a special
day of the week. For example, in Houston it was Sunday Trash Disco
at the Montrose Mining Company,
with Brian Broussard and John Sims setting the beat.

Now of course, since
this is Queer Music Heritage, I only play LGBT artists, which really
made it hard
for me, as there just were not that many openly gay dance artists
in that era. And that always seemed odd to me.
Here disco was supposedly the music of gay clubs, but the music
was not by our artists. There's a pretty
good website called discomusic.com and a while back they polled
DJs from around the world and came up
with a list of the best 700 disco songs. From that list I spotted
only 12 gay & lesbian artists, doing 21 songs.
So I'm not imagining things. For this show I put together two hours,
and 24 songs by 18 different artists.
You can find the track list on my site, and like in a dance club,
I'm not going to talk for the rest of the hour.
It will be solid music, starting with Dan Hartman.

Part
2
Welcome back to Queer Trash Disco, Part 2. This is JD Doyle and
I'm continuing my salute to the
Trash Disco of the late 70s and early 80s, and they are only by
LGBT artists, and like on Part 1,
after this intro I won't be talking for the rest of the hour, letting
you enjoy the music. This segment
begins with one of my absolute favorite songs, "Smalltown Boy,"
by Bronski Beat, and this version you
probably didn't hear in the clubs, as it's the extended one, that
begins slow, and then builds and builds.